The author, in his basic premise said, "Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact."

So let me understand, the author is basically implying that he probably accepts global warming being real, but don't worry, that's not important. What matters is the "human impact" the deaths per million per year.

Do you accept that premise? Think about that...

The author goes on to say, "Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s".

That I'm sure is a fact.

However, the author then goes on to say, with absolutely no substantiation or support, "The decreases in the numbers of deaths and death rates reflect a remarkable improvement in society’s adaptive capacity, likely due to greater wealth and better technology, enabled in part by use of hydrocarbon fuels. Imposing additional restrictions on the use of hydrocarbon fuels may slow the rate of improvement of this adaptive capacity and thereby worsen any negative impact of climate change. At the very least, the potential for such an adverse outcome should be weighed against any putative benefit arising from such restrictions.

That's garbage. His basic premise is garbage. That's why I decided not to pursue a discussion and move on.

JDN, (Jumping in late to what should have been dropped?) What I took from the article in context of the current global warming info and debate, warming is about 0.8 degrees Kelvin total over the entire history of fossil fuel use. Admitting that has nothing to do with whether you believe man's component is a 0.01 degree component or a 0.1 degree component or none of it. The alarmists predicted (did you see the movie?) the oceans will rise and the polars will melt and the ocean front location will move inland by hundreds of miles and that people will perish etc. THAT is what politicians and editorialists tell us is the CONSENSUS.

What I took from the Reason piece is that these observations don't match that theory. (It's the end of the world as we know, to R.E.M. music) Warming in the amounts of tenths of a degree per century especially if it was naturally caused and ended over 10 years ago instead of accelerating out of control as predicted does not threaten mankind or planet earth.

JDN as I understand it, you set up a straw man. The article doesn't prove there was no global warming. It wasn't supposed to. "Garbage" if the premise was that it proves or disproves something specific. It wasn't. It just shows vague evidence that we are experiencing situation normal here on planet earth, year after year, in spite of all we do that is wrong. Mankind and earth's ability to adapt is remarkable; that was their point. You even quoted it.-----There is a website called CO2Science.org that posts great articles and studies relating to living in a world where the atmospheric level of CO2 has grown by a whopping total of ... one part per ten thousand per century? Elevated CO2 levels (on that scale) are a fact. Causation and consequences are topics of study. They find out things like that elevated CO2 levels enhance plant growth, every indoor hydroponic grower already knows that, and that process consumes more CO2 and exhales more Oxygen (O2). Anyone who enjoys the fresh oxygen of a walk through a forest is going to love planet earth over the next century - with perhaps one more part per ten thousand per century of oxygen to breathe.

Doug, you are right, the article didn't prove or disprove anything. That was my exactly point. The article was pointless.

I have chosen not to enter in the discussion of global warming. I have no interest in delving into the science. However, as Huntsman has pointedout, if 80%+ of the World's Scientists think there is Global Warming, maybe there is something to it?

Me? I don't know. But simple logic tells me that the more pollutants I put in the air, or our water, or even our land, the worse the environment is going to be. That is why I support (yes, I know it's give and take) environmental pollution issues at the cost of jobs in the short term. Long term we will be better off.

I doubt there is anyone who advocates for unrestricted pollution. Actually the wealthier a society, the better the environment. People living hand to mouth don't have much opportunity to consider pollution when immediate survival blots out other concerns. The horrific pollution of the environment behind the iron curtain far exceeds anything done in the west, including the soviets using nukes for construction projects.

Also for the people living without an advanced electrical grid and petrochemical energy resources, they are much more vulnerable to extreme weather and natural disasters. Imagine the preindustrial cities in the US and europe. No car exhaust, but thick clouds of smoke hung over the cities from cooking/heating fires. The streets were packed with layers of horse dung and people tossed their "night soil" to run through the gutters of the street.

For JDN, you keep mixing and matching CO2 with pollutants, as do so many others. Fine, but when you make that jump you are weighing in on global warming and causation. No indication that you read or believe the numbers I posted. That's fine too. Would love to be disproven if false on those miniscule amounts of CO2 elevation and alleged total warming that I cited that are being used to justify anti-economic, anti-freedom policies. The shoreline in Florida has not moved and wildfires are not new in Texas.-----GM, This passage of yours made me think of the ancient city of Atlantis - still lost - as compared to New Orleans now re-built or the national recovery from the amazing tsunami in Japan. People in my neck of the woods are having record business years (3M) shipping safety equipment in large quantities by petroleum powered jet air freight what Pompei had no shot at.

"Also for the people living without an advanced electrical grid and petrochemical energy resources, they are much more vulnerable to extreme weather and natural disasters. Imagine the preindustrial cities in the US and europe..."

It takes resources and it takes energy to solve problems. The global warming scare is all about limiting our use of known energy and in quest for a less prosperous, more equal civilization. In fact the reverse strategy, allowing more freedom and building a more prosperous economy actually takes you further toward better health and safety.

The nation's accelerating shift from incandescent bulbs to a new generation of energy-efficient lighting is raising an environmental concern -- the release of tons of mercury every year.

The most popular new light -- the curly cue, compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs -- account for a quarter of new bulb sales and each contains up to 5 milligrams of mercury, a potent neurotoxin that's on the worst-offending list of environmental contaminants.

Demand for the bulbs is growing as federal and state mandates for energy-efficient lighting take effect, yet only about 2 percent of residential consumers and one-third of businesses recycle them, according to the Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers.

"If the recycling rate remains as abysmally low as it is, then there will certainly be more mercury released into the environment," said Paul Abernathy, executive director of the Napa-based recycling association. "Until the public really has some kind of convenient way to take them back, it's going to be an issue."

As a result of discarded fluorescent lights, including CFLs, U.S. landfills release into the atmosphere and in stormwater runoff upward of 4 tons of mercury annually, according to a study in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association.

I'm curious with regard to the four tons mentioned here, does anyone have an idea of the amount of mercury we release into the environment as a whole? -- understood that the four tons number will be growing rapidly as this legally imposed tragedy takes hold.

When mercury is released into the environment, it can be converted to methyl mercury by aquatic bacteria. Methyl mercury is a highly toxic compound that does not break down. Once introduced into the ground and water supply, mercury accumulates in living tissue through the aquatic food chain and can severely affect the health of humans and wildlife.

Products such as thermostats and thermometers, as well as smaller devices, including mercury switches and relays found in appliances and manufacturing equipment, contain a significant amount of mercury.

Concluding that it was critical to eliminate the use of mercury in those products where alternatives existed, the California State Legislature enacted Assembly Bill (AB) 1415. This law can be found in Health and Safety Code, Division 20, Chapter 6.5; Mercury-Added Thermostats, Relays, Switches, and Measuring Devices (Sections 25214.8.1-25214.8.6).

Mercury affects the behaviour of white ibises by "turning them homosexual", with higher doses resulting in males being more likely to pair with males.

Scientists in Florida and Sri Lanka studied the effect of mercury in the birds' diet. Their aim was to find out why it reduced the ibises' breeding.

Mercury pollution can come from burning coal and waste, and run-off from mines.

The report, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that wetland birds are particularly badly affected by it.

We're seeing very large reproductive effects at very low concentrations

Peter Frederick, biologist

Although the researchers already knew that eating mercury-contaminated food could affect an animal's development, they were surprised by the "strange" results of this experiment.

"We knew mercury could depress their testosterone (male sex hormone) levels," explained Dr Peter Frederick from the University of Florida, who led the study. "But we didn't expect this."

The team fed white ibises on food pellets that contained concentrations of mercury equivalent to those measured in the shrimp and crayfish that make up the birds' wetland diet.

The higher the dose of mercury in their food pellets, the more likely a male bird was to pair with another male.

Dr Frederick and his colleagues say the study shows that mercury could dramatically reduce the breeding rates of birds and possibly of other wildlife.

The exact mechanism that causes this change in behaviour is not yet fully understood.

But mercury is known to disrupt hormonal signalling, so it could have a direct impact on the sexual behaviour that is mediated by those hormones.

Importantly, the males with the higher mercury doses performed far fewer courtship displays, so they were more likely to be "ignored" by females.

Chemical mimic

Males fed higher mercury doses performed fewer courtship displays

Wetland habitats, like the Florida Everglades that are home to these birds, are particularly vulnerable to mercury contamination.

Bacteria that live in the thick, oxygen-free sludge chemically alter the mercury, turning it into its most toxic form - methylated mercury.

And this chemical can act as a sort of biological impostor, mimicking hormones that act as the body's natural chemical signals.

Some of these signals are involved in reproductive behaviour - they may stimulate an animal to carry out a courtship display or motivate it to mate.

"We're seeing very large reproductive effects at very low concentrations [of mercury]," said Dr Frederick. "So we really need to be paying more attention to this."

'Goldilocks mixture'

When a wetland is warm all year round, like the Everglades, it is an ideal environment for this methylation process.

Scientists refer to these conditions as a "Goldilocks mixture".

Dr Frederick says that measures could be taken to clean up any sources of mercury where they are close to wetland habitats - for example by filtering or "scrubbing" the smoke from nearby coal-burning power plants.

Gary Heinz, a wildlife researcher from the US Geological Survey in Maryland, who was not involved in the study, told the BBC that mercury was "a serious problem in many aquatic environments".

"It cannot be broken down, only be moved about and transformed from one chemical form to another," he said.

"And any effect that might reduce the productivity of a species would likely be harmful in nature."

Dr Heinz said the next step would be to study the reproductive behaviour of mercury-contaminated animals in the wild.

I'm curious with regard to the four tons mentioned here, does anyone have an idea of the amount of mercury we release into the environment as a whole? -- understood that the four tons number will be growing rapidly as this legally imposed tragedy takes hold.

I'm curious with regard to the four tons mentioned here, does anyone have an idea of the amount of mercury we release into the environment as a whole? -- understood that the four tons number will be growing rapidly as this legally imposed tragedy takes hold.

Allow me to offer for your consideration that this would be a good example of "The Law of Unintended Consequences" in action (see also my post describing the true consequences of high marginal tax rates for you). The appreciation of this law or not often explains some of the most enduring arguments between the left and right IMHO.

GM et al:

I wonder if this explains the seemingly increasing amounts of homosexuality amongst humans. Certainly I get that one can also say that less discrimination means that people come out of the closet more readily, but , , , I wonder what the mercury concentrations are in San Francisco? Irony abounds here in that much of the right sneers at the idea that pollution has real consequences, yet now we see the raw material for a scientific explanation for the ongoing emasculinazation of America and the West , , ,

Sorry, but I disagree. Lots of us on the right tend to sneer at pollution. Given the sources of the data, this is often understandable, but the bottom line IMHO is that we on the right could do a lot better than we are on this.

Sorry, but I disagree. Lots of us on the right tend to sneer at pollution. Given the sources of the data, this is often understandable, but the bottom line IMHO is that we on the right could do a lot better than we are on this.

I think it's sneering at the fearmongering the watermelons use to push their agenda. I don't want Beijing levels air/water pollution. Hell, I don't want any air pollution, but being an adult, I understand that it's a matter of cost/benefit analysis.

‘Son of Alar’: The New Pesticide Scare Campaignby Robert James Bidinotto

In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmentalist group, launched a nationwide panic over the presence on apples of alar, a chemical growth agent. On TV shows such as “60 Minutes” and “Donahue,” and in major women’s magazines, NRDC (with the aid of its expert consulting toxicologist, actress Meryl Streep) claimed that alar “might” eventually cause thousands of lifetime cancer cases due to apple consumption by preschoolers.

This carefully choreographed publicity stunt terrified parents, cost alar’s manufacturer millions, caused over $100 million in losses to apple growers—all while creating a fundraising bonanza for the NRDC.

The scare campaign was based on junk science—on experiments on laboratory rodents in which dose levels were so absurdly high that the animals were dying of simple poisoning. These tests were so shoddy that an independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA—called a Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP)—dismissed the findings as scientifically worthless.

Under political pressure to find something, however, the EPA ordered new tests on mice at dose levels that, again, were so outrageously high that 80 percent of the animals were poisoned to death. Not surprisingly, this overdosing produced the tumors the agency was looking for, and gave it the excuse to ban all use of the chemical.

I spent six months investigating this scam for a special report that appeared in the October 1990 Reader’s Digest. After its publication, many people—echoing the rock group The Who—concluded that “we won’t be fooled again” by environmentalist fear-mongers.

But now a new pesticide panic is underway. Once again, it is being incited by the NRDC, with additional litigation pressure from trial lawyers. Once again, the scare campaign rests on studies that amount to little more than “junk science.” This time, though, the target is an herbicide that plays a far more significant role in agriculture: atrazine.

Atrazine is a valuable weed-killer used to protect corn, sugar cane, and other crops. The EPA has estimated that farming without atrazine would cost corn farmers $28 an acre—the difference between getting by and going bankrupt for thousands of farms across the Midwest—and would cause sugar-cane crop losses from 10 to 40 percent. The overall cost to U.S. farmers would top $2 billion dollars annually.

Not only is atrazine effective, it is safe. The chemical has been on the market for half a century, during which time its safety has been tested to death—some 6,000 studies, here and abroad, including reviews by the World Health Organization and other international bodies.

Following a dozen years of exhaustive examination of scientific evidence about claims of possible health problems stemming from the chemical, the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs reported to Congress on February 16, 2005: “After a very careful assessment, EPA’s current view is that the available studies do not adequately demonstrate such effects. A panel of independent, external experts, the SAP, supports EPA’s position.” Concluding that cumulative risks posed “no harm that would result to the general U.S. population, infant, children or other . . . consumers,” the EPA re-registered atrazine for use in 2006.

But that was then; this is now:

* The NRDC is beating the drum to ban this critical herbicide. Last September, it released another of its junk-science reports, Atrazine: Poisoning the Well, declaring that the chemical was “linked” to all sorts of “potential” health problems, and raising the specter of unsafe concentrations in ground water. This, despite the fact that the EPA safety margin, which limits atrazine concentrations in drinking water to no more than three parts per billion, is set more than one thousand times below the threshold of any health concerns. Just as it did in engineering its alar hoax, NRDC is enlisting green sympathizers in the media to help terrorize the public. For example, it supplied material to a New York Times reporter for an article under the panic-provoking title, “Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass.”

* One month after NRDC released its report, the EPA ordered that atrazine—re-registered in 2006—become subject to re-re-registration. They specifically cited the NRDC report and New York Times scare piece as their reason for doing so. This, too, echoes the case of alar, when EPA, lacking any sound evidence to ban its targeted chemical, kept demanding new tests and reviews until it finally manufactured some lame excuse to do so.

* In addition to this chemophobic cadre, personal-injury trial lawyers, led by the notorious Texas law firm of Baron & Budd, have jumped in to cash in. Attorney Stephen Tillery, operating in the litigation paradise of Madison County, Illinois, is engineering class-action lawsuits against atrazine’s manufacturer and various users. Their claims of atrazine’s “harm” rest on junk-science rodent studies already rejected by the EPA’s expert Scientific Advisory Panel.

All this has left atrazine’s beleaguered manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc., fighting to defend its product and reputation on multiple fronts. The prospect of a ban has also left struggling farmers, who rely on this herbicide to spare their crops, worried about their financial survival. If it occurs, then an economy deep in recession would take an additional hit from crop failures and soaring food prices.

But, bad as the immediate economic costs would be, the long-term regulatory ramifications would be much worse.

To institute their green fantasies of organic agriculture and returning farmland to “nature,” the NRDC and its allies aim to make toxicology safety thresholds so stringent that no agrochemicals could past legal muster. That’s precisely why they’ve singled out atrazine. As the Wall Street Journal noted recently, “The environmental lobby also figures that if it can take down atrazine with its long record of clean health, it can get the EPA to prohibit anything.”

Seen from this perspective, the alar scare was just the opening salvo in the environmentalist barrage against man-made chemicals. Today’s atrazine scare—as Yogi Berra might put it—is “déjà vu all over again.” And Yogi might also ask those of us burdened by this unending regulatory onslaught: “How do you like them apples?”

Of course the devil will be in the details, but on the whole my gut reaction to this POTH(NYT) editorial is favorable.

What is yours?==============================

The Obama administration this week officially began what it hopes will be a sustained push to reverse decades of man-made degradation in the Gulf of Mexico. The trigger for this effort is last year’s disastrous BP oil spill. But the administration’s strategy goes beyond repairing immediate damages, to the task of restoring the entire ecosystem to good health.

The plan includes the essential task of rebuilding the marshes and barrier islands that act as fish nurseries and defenses against storms. Overdevelopment, levee-building on the Mississippi River and mile upon mile of oil and gas pipelines and shipping channels have done enormous damage.

The plan also calls for a serious effort to reduce the flow of excess nutrients that have created an oxygen-starved “dead zone” in the gulf, where fish cannot survive. The presidential task force behind the plan announced $50 million in assistance from the Agriculture Department to help farmers control polluted runoff.

That is only a fraction of the billions of dollars that will be needed for full-scale restoration. The question is where the big money will come from. Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat of Louisiana, has proposed a smart bill that would earmark 80 percent of the civil penalties from the spill to long-term restoration. BP and other companies involved could wind up owing between $5 billion and $20 billion in fines, depending on the degree of negligence. Under normal circumstances, most of this money would disappear into the general treasury.

A Senate committee approved the Landrieu bill in September, though there has yet to be a floor vote. A somewhat less generous bill has been introduced in the House, where committee hearings began this week.

Congress failed to enact meaningful new laws in the aftermath of the BP spill. It also failed to follow through on promises to restore the marshes and barrier islands after Hurricane Katrina. The Landrieu bill gives it another chance to rescue an immensely valuable ecosystem. ==================and, what do we make of this?

By STEPHANIE SIMON And DANIEL GILBERT DENVER—Colorado is poised to decide Tuesday whether to force energy companies to publicly disclose the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing, a decision freighted with additional significance after the Environmental Protection Agency this week linked the drilling technique to chemicals in drinking water near a Wyoming town.

Colorado is poised to decide Monday whether to force companies to disclose the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing. Other states are considering similar disclosure regulations. Stephanie Simon has details on The News Hub. Photo: AP.States including Texas, Wyoming and Montana already require some disclosure of chemicals used in the process, known as fracking. Other states, such as North Dakota, are considering similar measures. But in most cases, drillers are permitted by states to withhold some of the chemical names as trade secrets from competitors—part of drillers' proprietary formula for extracting oil and gas from rocks deep underground.

The proposed Colorado regulations also would allow companies to withhold some chemical names from public disclosure, since trade secrets are protected by both federal and state law. But at an emotional 11-hour hearing last week, environmental activists pleaded with state officials to limit that privilege. The activists renewed that call on Friday, in light of the EPA's findings in Wyoming.

"That should be a gut check for the state," said Mike Chiropolos of Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group in Boulder, Colo.

In its draft report on the Wyoming contamination, the EPA cautioned that the findings were specific to a particular field near Pavillion, Wyo., where gas wells were drilled in close proximity to water wells. The fracking took place at relatively shallow depth and was much closer to an underground aquifer than many other operations elsewhere. The wells were also much older and lacked some safeguards, such as cement casing at certain intervals, that are standard in new wells today.

Encana Corp., the operator of the wells in Pavillion and the second-largest gas producer in North America, said that it did not cause the contamination, and it called the EPA report inconclusive.

Tisha Conoly Schuller, president of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, said energy companies in the state already emphasize protecting groundwater. In 2008, Colorado passed one of the most comprehensive drilling regulations in the nation. The rules limited how close drilling can be to certain drinking-water sources and mandated extensive steel and cement casing around oil and gas wells to isolate the fracking fluid from nearby aquifers.

Energy companies have voluntarily disclosed chemicals used at hundreds of wells across Colorado. Nearly two-thirds of those disclosures do not invoke trade secrets to keep certain chemicals confidential, according to state regulators who reviewed 300 of the reports. Overall, fewer than than 6% of chemical names were shielded by the trade secret privilege, the officials said.

Industry executives in Colorado say they do support some mandatory disclosure. But they have resisted some of the specific proposals pushed by environmentalists, such as a requirement that they publicly disclose the concentration of each chemical in their fracking fluid. They say that would in effect give a recipe book to rivals looking to copy their technique.

The state's regulatory body, the nine-member Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, will debate the issue on Tuesday. Also up for debate: whether private citizens should be able to challenge drilling companies over their use of the trade-secret privilege to withhold chemical names.

Of course POTH is a suspect source and I am completely unfamiliar with this issue, but if true this seems quite significant.

The oceans have always served as a sink for carbon dioxide, but the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution, especially over the last 40 years, has given them more than they can safely absorb. The result is acidification — a change in the chemical balance that threatens the oceans’ web of life.

Pace of Ocean Acidification Has No Parallel in 300 Million Years, Paper Says (March 2, 2012) In earth’s history, there have been many episodes of acidification, mainly from prolonged volcanic eruptions. According to a new research review by paleoceanographers at Columbia University, published in Science, the oceans may be turning acid far faster than at any time in the past 300 million years.

Changing something as fundamental as the pH of seawater — a measurement of how acid or alkaline it is — has profound effects. Increased acidity attacks the shells of shellfish and the skeletal foundation of corals, dissolving the calcium carbonate they’re made of. Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Ocean acidification threatens the corals and every other species that makes its living on the reefs.

The authors tried to determine which past acidification events offer the best comparison to what is happening now. The closest analogies are catastrophic events, often associated with intense volcanic activity resulting in major extinctions. The difference is that those events covered thousands of years. We have acidified the oceans in a matter of decades, with no signs that we have the political will to slow, much less halt, the process.

I'm quite aware of scaremongering by watermelon greens, but I must say that this sounds plausible to me:================

Peering into the microscope, Alan Barton thought the baby oysters looked normal, except for one thing: They were dead.

Slide after slide, the results were the same. The entire batch of 100 million larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery had perished.

It took several years for the Oregon oyster breeder and a team of scientists to find the culprit: a radical change in ocean acidity.

The acid levels rose so high that the larvae could not form their protective shells, according to a study published this year. The free-swimming baby oysters would struggle for days, then fall exhausted to the floor of the tank.

"There's no debating it," said Barton, who manages Whiskey Creek, which supplies three-quarters of the oyster seed to independent shellfish farms from Washington to California. "We're changing the chemistry of the oceans."

Rising acidity doesn't just imperil the West Coast's $110-million oyster industry. It ultimately will threaten other marine animals, the seafood industry and even the health of humans who eat affected shellfish, scientists say.

The world's oceans have become 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution began more than two centuries ago. In that time, the seas have absorbed 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide that has built up in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

By taking in that amount — more than one-quarter of the greenhouse gas that has accumulated in the atmosphere — the oceans have buffered the full effects of climate change, scientists say: Temperatures have not risen as much as they would have otherwise, glaciers haven't melted as fast. Yet the benefits are coming at a cost to marine life, especially oysters, clams and corals that rely on the minerals in alkaline seawater to build their protective shells and exoskeletons. The ill effects of the changing chemistry only add to the oceans' problems, which include warming temperatures and expanding low-oxygen "dead zones."

By the end of the century, said French biological oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso, "The oceans will become hot, sour and breathless."

He was one of 540 scientists from 37 countries who gathered last month in Monterey, Calif., to discuss their findings on oceans in a "high-C02 world."

The full brunt of ocean acidification won't hit for decades. But scientists say the only sure way to avoid the worst is to significantly reduce carbon emissions. Some also have been exploring ways to restore the ocean's alkalinity through artificial means, such as spreading vast amounts of limestone or other minerals on the ocean surface. It's not yet clear whether either approach is realistic.

The West Coast provides a jarring glimpse of what lies ahead if trends continue, said Richard A. Feely, a chemical oceanographer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Feely and a team of scientists have been tracking particularly acidic waters as they well up from the deep ocean and slosh onto the continental shelf off California, Oregon and Washington. "We found corrosive water everywhere we looked, particularly off California and Oregon," he said.

The cold, nutrient-laden waters from the deep sea are naturally more acidic than surface waters. Human contributions of CO2 only add to that acidity.

A few years ago, the shellfish industry became alarmed that 80% of oyster larvae at hatcheries were not surviving. Initially, they blamed an aggressive strain of bacteria.

But after Feely found evidence of corrosive waters reaching the West Coast, industry officials asked him and other scientists if there might be a connection to the die-offs. Sure enough, scientists found a link by studying the Whiskey Creek hatchery at Netarts Bay, Ore., whose larvae were bathed in acidic waters drawn in by intake pipes.

Oyster larvae are particularly sensitive in their first few days of life. As acidity rises in the ocean, the abundance of calcium carbonate — a mineral they need to build their shells — is gradually reduced. At extremely high levels of acidity, laboratory experiments show, seawater no longer provides this material and indeed can cause existing shells of corals, snails and other animals to dissolve.

Now, the Whiskey Creek hatchery tries to balance the acidity of its waters by adding soda ash. Costs have increased and production has never fully recovered. "We're limping along and manipulating the water to stay in business," Barton said.

Ocean acidification, once an obscure area of scientific inquiry, has quickly become of much wider interest. Because colder water can hold more CO2, scientists expect to see the first major changes in northern waters, where increasing acidity could melt away the bottom rungs of the food chain, such as pteropods, the button-sized marine snails that nourish salmon and other fish.

I have read and greatly enjoyed two books by the author of this aritcle (The Red Queen and Nature via Nurture). He has my respect.==============================

Can Medieval Heat Cool Warming Worries? By MATT RIDLEY..

A flurry of recent scientific papers has tried to measure the warmth of the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether it was cooler or warmer than today, and whether the warmth was global or regional. The point for nonscientists: If recent warming has precedents, some might find it less alarming.

If recent warmth has precedents, some might find it less alarming.

Until the late 1990s, researchers generally agreed that the MWP was warmer than today and that the "Little Ice Age" of 1500-1800 was colder. Then in 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted the "hockey stick" graph devised by Michael Mann at the University of Virginia and colleagues.

Using temperature indicators such as tree rings and lake sediments, the graph rewrote history by showing little warmth in the 11th century and little cold in the 17th, but a sharp spike in late-20th-century temperatures. That graph helped to persuade many people (such as me) that recent temperature rises were unprecedented in scale and speed in at least 1,400 years.

But critics of the graph pointed out that it used a statistical technique that overemphasized hockey-stick shaped data from unreliable indicators, such as tree rings in bristlecone pine trees and Scandinavian lake sediments influenced by 20th-century land-use changes. Four recent studies have now rehabilitated the MWP as a period of unusual warmth, though they disagree on whether it was as warm or warmer than today.

Jan Esper of the University of Mainz and his colleagues looked at pine wood densities from Sweden and Finland and found "evidence for substantial warmth during Roman and medieval times, larger in extent and longer in duration than 20th-century warmth." Bo Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute and Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University looked at 32 indicators across the Northern Hemisphere and found the level of warmth during the peak of the MWP "in the second half of the 10th century equaling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming."

Thomas Melvin of the University of East Anglia and colleagues reanalyzed one of the tree samples from Sweden used in the "hockey stick" and concluded: "We can infer the existence of generally warm summers in the 10th and 11th centuries, similar to the level of those in the 20th century."

A fourth study of creatures called diatoms in Chinese lake sediments found that the period "between ca. A.D. 1150 and 1200 was the warmest interval of the past 1,000 years."

Taken together, these studies cast doubt on the IPCC's conclusion in 2007 that "the evidence is not sufficient to support a conclusion that [Northern] hemispheric mean temperatures were as warm, or the extent of warm regions as expansive, as those in the 20th century as a whole, during any period in medieval times."

But was the medieval warm period confined to the Northern Hemisphere?

I consulted a database of papers collated by the climate-skeptic website CO2Science.org, run by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a nonprofit research center in Tempe, Ariz. The database contains numerous published studies of isotopes and other indicators in caves, lake sediments and other samples from Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and Antarctica that find the MWP warmer than today. Two Antarctic studies, for instance, concluded that current warming "is not yet as extreme in nature as the MWP" and that "the present state of reduced ice on the western Antarctic Peninsula is not unprecedented." A far smaller number of studies, such as one from Lake Tanganyika, found the MWP cooler than today.

It remains possible that today's warming is different from that of the Middle Ages. For example, while summers might have been warmer then, winters might be warmer today (if today's warming is caused by carbon dioxide, that should be true). And of course, it is the future, not the past, that scientists expect to be dangerous. Nonetheless, the evidence increasingly vindicates the scientists who first discovered the Medieval Warm Period.

"The total Antarctic sea-ice cover is increasing slowly, but individual regions are actually experiencing much larger gains and losses that are almost offsetting each other overall. We now know that these regional changes are caused by changes in the winds, which in turn affect the ice cover through changes in both ice drift and air temperature."

Higher temperatures over the past two decades have caused the polar ice sheets to melt at an accelerating rate, contributing to an almost half-inch rise in global sea levels, according to the most comprehensive study done so far.

Scientists long have struggled to get a fix on whether the permanent ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are gaining or losing ice. Past satellite-based measurements either were limited in scope or suffered from methodological inconsistencies.

The new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, estimates that the melting of the ice sheets as a whole has raised global sea levels by 11.1 millimeters (0.43 inch) since 1992. That represents one-fifth of the total sea-level increase recorded in that period.

In the 1990s, melting of the polar ice sheets was responsible for about 10% of the global sea-level rise, but now it represents about 30%, the data suggest. Higher temperatures can raise sea levels in several ways. Some estimates suggest that roughly half of the increase relates to the thermal expansion of the oceans: as the water warms, it becomes less dense and expands. Another source is the runoff from melting glaciers. A third is the increased melting of the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.

Greenland in particular has seen a greater melting of its permanent ice. One reason is that Northern Hemisphere ocean currents are warmer, which leads to more vigorous melting. In addition, the air temperature in Greenland is much warmer than that in the Antarctic, so a rise in temperature in Greenland has a more profound effect.

"If you extrapolate these results, Greenland is going to be a serious contributor to global sea-level rise" in coming years, said Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, England, who wasn't involved in the Science study. "Its contribution, relative to other sources, is becoming greater and greater," he said.

The issue of rising sea levels has gained more attention in recent months. The destructive flooding caused by the storm Sandy, which struck the U.S. East Coast in late October, revived anxieties about rising ocean levels in heavily populated coastal regions.

To assess the contribution from melting ice sheets, scientists try to measure "mass balance," which is the difference between the annual snow that falls on the permanent ice sheets each year, and the total mass of ice that melts or breaks off the sheets. It is an extremely complex measurement, because there are so many factors at work: shifting ocean currents, the dynamics and movement of large ice shelves, and the varying temperature and saltiness of water at different places.

Consequently, researchers don't yet know exactly how much of the ice-sheet melt is caused by a warming atmosphere and how much by a warming ocean.

The last major assessment of mass balance was published in a 2007 report on climate change issued by the United Nations. But those findings were based on limited observations, and many scientists considered them to underestimate the melting.

The latest effort reconciles the differences among dozens of earlier measurements and includes new data to compile an estimate that is believed to be twice as accurate as previous ones, according to researchers involved.

"It allows us to make some firm conclusions," said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds in England and a lead author of the study. "It wasn't clear if Antarctica was gaining or losing ice. Now we can say with confidence it is losing ice."

The 2007 U.N. report, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggested that similar amounts of ice were being lost at both the polar regions. By contrast, the new study concludes that two-thirds of the ice loss was in Greenland and the remainder in Antarctica.

The latest findings show that the rate of ice loss in Greenland has increased almost fivefold since the mid-1990s, while Antarctica overall has been losing relatively small amounts of ice at a more or less constant rate.

"Antarctica is so cold that even if warming occurs it won't melt" at the rate seen in Greenland, said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and a co-author of the new paper.

One tricky question is whether the overall accelerated melting of the ice sheets can be linked to man-made climate change. The shrinkage of the permanent ice sheets can't entirely be explained by any of the decadeslong or centurylong natural shifts in climate cycles, according to Prof. Shepherd. Scientists note that current climate-change models predict that some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet will grow while other parts will shrink, and that parts of the Greenland ice also will melt. Observations have borne out these projections so far.

"The signals suggest there is no immediate threat" from rising sea levels, Prof. Shepherd said. "But we can at least warn people that there are instabilities that need to be investigated."

The study involved 26 laboratories and was supported by the European Space Agency and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The data used for the study were based on measurements from 10 separate satellite missions.

This 22 minute talk comes touted by Anthony Watts this week as "one of the most important posts ever" on Watts up with that, one of the top environmental sites on the internet.

Ecologist Allan Savory shows how to solve with low technology and relatively low cost the climate change problem that is perhaps worse than all fossil fuel use, the turning of the world's grasslands into deserts.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.Temperature Rising

Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.

China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more responsible than any other nation for the high level.

The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa.

But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.

Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve.

Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.

Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption.

“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.”

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping heat near the surface of the earth.

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”

China Eco-Boosterism, RevisitedWhy did Western liberals think China was a model for environmentalism?By BRET STEPHENSWSJ LOnce upon a time the future belonged to China—and China was going to be green. Greener than the hills of olde England.

"China is pulling ahead on the environment," was the title of a 2009 column in Forbes. "China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race," Peter Ford reported in the Christian Science Monitor the same year. "Green Giant" was the title of a 7,000-word thumb-sucker by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, which spelled out the scale of the Chinese government's investment in green tech.

And there was this: "Being in China right now," wrote Tom Friedman of the New York Times in January 2010, "I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China's Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership understands that the E.T.—Energy Technology—revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it."

Well, all of us columnists have off days.

The heady optimism of four years ago has now given way to more sober views, thanks to the accretion of facts. Facts like 16,000 dead pigs floating down Shanghai's Whampoa river in March. Or the worst air pollution on record in Beijing in January, with levels of tiny particulate matter reaching levels 25 times higher than the standard in the U.S. Or 80% of the East China Sea lost to fishing because of the pollution, according to Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations. Or 1.2 million premature deaths due to air pollution, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study.

Another nugget: "A recent social media campaign led by locals and international activists shed light on the growing phenomena of 'cancer villages'—areas where water pollution is so bad that it has led to a sharp rise in diseases like stomach cancer," wrote Thomas Thompson last month in Foreign Affairs. "The China Geological Survey now estimates that 90% of China's cities depend on polluted groundwater supplies. Water that has been purified at treatment plants is often recontaminated en route to homes."

Enlarge ImageimageimageAFP/Getty Images

Kosher it isn't.

Think about that one as you plan your family holiday in the Middle Kingdom. But think also about how the minters of conventional wisdom managed to get it so totally wrong about China's environmental prospects, even as the reality of China's environment burns into your lungs the moment you step outside the airport terminal.

One explanation is that the media's China boosterism was really Obama boosterism in disguise, following the rule that the best way to promote statism at home is to point to (alleged) successes of statism abroad.

"The Obama administration is busy repairing the energy legacy of its predecessor," wrote Mr. Osnos. "The stimulus package passed in February [2009] puts more than $38 billion into the Department of Energy for renewable energy projects. . . . Obama vowed to return America's investment in research and development to a level not seen since the space race. 'The nation that leads the world in the 21st century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st century global economy,' [Mr. Obama] said recently."

It's hard to say, in the midst of the shale revolution, whether it's Mr. Obama or his media ventriloquists who sound sillier. But an even sillier mistake was to conflate "green energy" and other supposedly environment-friendly investments with the interests of the environment itself. "Green," in other words, should not be confused with green.

So it is with China, which is installing wind turbines and producing solar panels at world-beating rates. But as the Manhattan Institute's Robert Bryce keeps pointing out, renewables will never substitute for traditional fuels. Had China invested the money and time it wasted on renewables into developing its shale resources and seeking to substitute coal with gas it would be on its way to a greener future. That's something the Sierra Club might consider in its fervid opposition to fracking, given that Chinese contaminants account for most of the pollution in California's Lake Tahoe.

Finally, there is the little matter of corruption. Western liberals adore the China model because they think being "China for one day" can force the kind of sweeping environmental legislation that democratic, interest-group driven politics prevents.

But the biggest reason China is so filthy isn't a lack of environmental legislation. It's rampant corner-cutting by unaccountable politicians and managers at state-owned enterprises trying to meet production quotas. Statism always wrecks the environment.

That's a lesson you might have thought Western liberals would have learned following the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the environmental rot it exposed. Instead, it didn't even occur to them that enthusing about a "Green Leap Forward" didn't exactly hark back to an auspicious historical precedent.

But then, the left never learns. Let's just hope the current Leap Forward doesn't prove as catastrophic as the last one.

My understanding of proper free market economics is that all costs should be born by the buyer and seller of the transaction. Costs that are born by others are an "external diseconomy". EDs are a proper area of governmental action.

The World's Resources Aren't Running OutEcologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again...

Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Austria is a rare example of an ecologist who takes economics seriously. He points out that his fellow ecologists have been using "human appropriation of net primary production"—that is, the percentage of the world's green vegetation eaten or prevented from growing by us and our domestic animals—as an indicator of ecological limits to growth. Some ecologists had begun to argue that we were using half or more of all the greenery on the planet.

This is wrong, says Dr. Haberl, for several reasons. First, the amount appropriated is still fairly low: About 14.2% is eaten by us and our animals, and an additional 9.6% is prevented from growing by goats and buildings, according to his estimates. Second, most economic growth happens without any greater use of biomass. Indeed, human appropriation usually declines as a country industrializes and the harvest grows—as a result of agricultural intensification rather than through plowing more land.

Finally, human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertilizer taken up by crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation too (sometimes too much, causing algal blooms in water). In places like the Nile delta, wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing human food....Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before.

The reason was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population.

The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling.

Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve.

But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out.

As a Michigan resident (I only live about 20 miles from 'the lake' as we say, meaning Lake Michigan), I am happy to offer a first hand report that Lake levels are returning to higher levels after the severe winter... One of my favorite beaches to run my dog is physically under water.

Edited by Mark H. Thiemens, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and approved May 8, 2014 (received for review March 19, 2014)

AbstractAuthors & InfoSIMetricsPDFPDF + SI

Significance

Thwaites Glacier is one of the West Antarctica's most prominent, rapidly evolving, and potentially unstable contributors to global sea level rise. Uncertainty in the amount and spatial pattern of geothermal flux and melting beneath this glacier is a major limitation in predicting its future behavior and sea level contribution. In this paper, a combination of radar sounding and subglacial water routing is used to show that large areas at the base of Thwaites Glacier are actively melting in response to geothermal flux consistent with rift-associated magma migration and volcanism. This supports the hypothesis that heterogeneous geothermal flux and local magmatic processes could be critical factors in determining the future behavior of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Abstract

Heterogeneous hydrologic, lithologic, and geologic basal boundary conditions can exert strong control on the evolution, stability, and sea level contribution of marine ice sheets. Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers. This lack of observational constraint on geothermal flux is particularly problematic for the glacier catchments of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet within the low topography of the West Antarctic Rift System where geothermal fluxes are expected to be high, heterogeneous, and possibly transient. We use airborne radar sounding data with a subglacial water routing model to estimate the distribution of basal melting and geothermal flux beneath Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica. We show that the Thwaites Glacier catchment has a minimum average geothermal flux of ∼114 ± 10 mW/m2 with areas of high flux exceeding 200 mW/m2 consistent with hypothesized rift-associated magmatic migration and volcanism. These areas of highest geothermal flux include the westernmost tributary of Thwaites Glacier adjacent to the subaerial Mount Takahe volcano and the upper reaches of the central tributary near the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core drilling site. subglacial hydrology ice-penetrating radar

Both of these sites (2 posts) have bunk and de-bunk backwards, and both de-bunk themselves quite nicely. The attacks center around the smearing of critics and non-denial denials of what the critics are saying. They "debunk" by calling Richard Lindzen, Atmospheric Physicist at MIT, and Roy Spencer, climatologist and Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former NASA scientist, and others "psuedo" scientists, while calling their own discredited people "peer reviewed".

It is the alarmists who manipulated the data and processes and published bunk. Yes, there is CO2 gain and yes, there has been warming over the last 500 years and many others times before that, but no, none of the alarmists claims has come true or is about to.

Don't beliieve your own lying temperature sensors, but it was the coldest winter where I live in more than 30 years: http://www.startribune.com/blogs/246923781.html Not exactly spiraling heat, nor is there proof that atmospheric trace component CO2 is the lead component of global temperature change. It is a weak correlation, if any.

Yes, the warming stopped 16-17 years ago. If the data manipulators allege .001 degree warming since then, ask them for the mathematical margin of error of the sampled data, not counting their well documented, measurement and manipulation errors.

The warming period preceded the industrial age by hundreds of years. But the allegation, debunked, is that the warming is spiraling out of control. Really? The data says no and the models are false. The "hockey stick" is a well-discredited lie. We knew that before the last 17 years proved it.

The IPCC folks stood behind Al Gore, like James Hansen with his secret algorithms for altering raw data, and Michael Mann of Hide-the-Decline and stack-the-peer review fame, published their bunk. Then others like Lindzen and Spencer de-bunked it. And now the alarmists respond by re-stating the original bunk, while smearing their critics, financed by Koch, etc. as if that sets it all straight. It doesn't.

Where did their models predict that warming would or could pause? They didn't.

Climate change is a fact; it has been going on since the beginning of the earth. The validity of a direct link, however, between higher CO2 levels, man-made CO2 levels alone causing higher temperatures has been broken.

While the alarmists question the credentials of a Harvard educated, MIT atmospheric physicist, this Boston Globe columnist served on the Boston city council for 5 years in the 1990s. If you don't believe him, he says re-read the same, discredited UN IPCC bunk, as if that is a second source.

Anyone want to bet whether he has read past the sensational headlines?